Stimulating

I am making stimuli. Rather, I am making potential stimuli. The stimuli are not very stimulating.

The scribbled note says:
"I need 50 pairs of words - mono and disyllables. Within a pair one has a front vowel and one a back vowel. E.g.

beet -- boot
beetle -- bottle

The words need to refer to something picturable."

How's that for directions? My advisor is smart as a whip but she's never been what anyone would call a great communicator.

I have spent the last hour rotating the simple vowels of English through simple word frames like "p_p". Unfortunately, several excellently picturable monosyllabic words are naughty, like "cock". I can't use these since although we like to think that from a phonological perspective at least they are just words like any others, the truth of the matter is there are some words you just can't use in an experiment.

E.g., we had an experimenter who included the word "slut" in his stimuli. The grads who he piloted all commented on it. "Yeah, I got to 'slut' and I stuttered and fell apart." "Me too. I started laughing, you've gotta take that out." But the researcher refused on the grounds that that the word "slut" was ok to use since the dictionary defined it as an untidy woman. While that is certainly not very nice, it's not all that loaded a definition, right? We tried explaining to this researcher, who spoke english very well but as something like his 8th language, that "slut" (a) pretty much exclusively meant promiscuous to most people and (b) was a very strong word. He would not be swayed. He stood by the numerous dictionaries which list the promiscuous meaning second, evidence that this very negative meaning was the less salient one and not something to worry about. Further, he told us, "I need 'slut' to balance out 'slot'." I think I snotted on myself when he said that.

I'm going to just avoid those words.
Maybe I'll have better luck with the consonant clusters, you know, like "pr_k" and "cr_k".